Acts 19:21-41 (with a special nod to C. Vivian Stringer)
April 5, 2007 . . .
Acts 19 (continued from last week)
21After all this had happened, Paul decided to go to Jerusalem, passing through Macedonia and Achaia. "After I have been there," he said, "I must visit Rome also." 22He sent two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, to Macedonia, while he stayed in the province of Asia a little longer.
The Riot in Ephesus
23About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way.
We capitalize "the Way" here, because it signifies the way of Christ. Presumably, anyone on that Way has decided to live out his or her life in the manner and character of Christ. So a dispute in this is no small matter.
24A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in no little business for the craftsmen. 25He called them together, along with the workmen in related trades, and said: "Men, you know we receive a good income from this business. 26And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that man-made gods are no gods at all. 27There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited, and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty."
Now, who is this goddess, Artemis? She was the patron of Ephesus, regarded as a particularly powerful goddess in the Greek pantheon of gods. What's happening in this passage is that Paul's preaching has become a particular threat. This fellow is particularly upset because it might mean loss of business, loss of money. Here's the thing about religion: If you can get enough folk to believe, the more devout you can make them, the more you can heap upon them a certain need to give.
Indeed, there's one woman who has written a book, who claims that most Americans aren't particularly literate about their faith. One of the things she claims is that most Americans can't even identify the first book of the Bible. Here, we know, because of sound instruction, that the first book is Genesis, and the last book of the Christian Bible is Revelation. Some people may not even know the sacraments of the church, but you know that here we have only two: baptism and communion. Our baptism is not in John, but in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit (see last study's blog entry). We also know that to follow Christ means to pick up a cross, which means that the walking of the Way isn't one strewn with rose petals and velvet carpet. It's rough sometimes. It can be hard.
This business of making money out of religion is a corruption. There's a powerful inducement to the corruption of one's own faith in this commercialization of faith. Part of what Paul has been doing is correcting this. To the extent to which he's been successful, the people who make a living out of the worship of Artemis have been suffering.
28When they heard this, they were furious and began shouting: "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!"
Now, that seems to reflect a certain real devotion to this goddess, which would mean that they'd need to have known what this goddess represents.
29Soon the whole city was in an uproar. The people seized Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul's traveling companions from Macedonia, and rushed as one man into the theater. 30Paul wanted to appear before the crowd, but the disciples would not let him. 31Even some of the officials of the province, friends of Paul, sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater.
32The assembly was in confusion: Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not even know why they were there. 33The Jews pushed Alexander to the front, and some of the crowd shouted instructions to him. He motioned for silence in order to make a defense before the people. 34But when they realized he was a Jew, they all shouted in unison for about two hours: "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!"
35The city clerk quieted the crowd and said: "Men of Ephesus, doesn't all the world know that the city of Ephesus is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemis and of her image, which fell from heaven? 36Therefore, since these facts are undeniable, you ought to be quiet and not do anything rash. 37You have brought these men here, though they have neither robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess. 38If, then, Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody, the courts are open and there are proconsuls. They can press charges. 39If there is anything further you want to bring up, it must be settled in a legal assembly. 40As it is, we are in danger of being charged with rioting because of today's events. In that case we would not be able to account for this commotion, since there is no reason for it." 41After he had said this, he dismissed the assembly.
These folks are worked up! They're worked up into confusion. It's a mob, which is always unreflective, ill-tempered, immoderate, lacking in discipline or forethought. All the virtues you'd want anyone to present vanish in the context of a mob. It's as though you need to be suspicious when people in a group begin to yelp and holler and scream.
So here's the question: How do you separate the screaming and the hollering of the mob in this situation, and the confusion that is precipitated by this screaming and hollering, from what happened in our church on Easter Sunday morning? On that morning in our church, it seemed there was a collective spirit of joy, and at various moments during the service, it erupted. We see that people in accord with one another expressed themselves as a single body. What is the difference between that and this mob?There was a genuine feeling of fellowship in the church on Sunday. Several things happened along the way. One of them had to do with the music. There was a moment ... Robert took a solo. He invested himself. If had an inhibition, he didn't know how to spell it when he was done! He just threw himself into it. He just let himself go. And at some point in the sermon, Preston jumped up out of the pew, expressing his enthusiasm for Christ and his message of love.
But we probably shouldn't identify any of that with a mob reaction. There's a difference between a mob and a people being filled with the spirit of God. And, of course, the difference here is that these people are out there, gathered by a silversmith to make a noise and a racket because he feared that his livelihood might be lost. The objective is the difference. In this passage, the objective is about holding onto their money.
Now, people can be a mob without being together--engaging in "groupthink," group anger. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time during the day listening to the radio, and there are folk who have a livelihood on the radio, shock jocks. One of these is a man named Imus. And Imus, who's always engaged for the sake of having more listeners, is a man who's accustomed to pushing the envelope, and he pushed it until it burst. He said an ugly, nasty thing about young women on the basketball team at Rutgers University.
He pushed the boundaries racially and sexually, and for what? To make a buck. When he pushed, some folk pushed back, and he lost his job. Part of the reason why he was successful was that he was commercially effective. The more people listened to him, the more people engaged in groupthink and didn't ask, "Is this appropriate? Is this the will of God? Should there be a show where people are denigrated and molested with words? To do it for the sake of mammon?"
Here's the difference between the reaction we had on Sunday and the reaction to someone like Imus, who appears to worship money. The coach of the women's team has been on TV more than once, an articulate, decent human being. Her personality by contrast with Imus ... so sparkling. Like the difference between light and dark, between day and night. (Incidentally, C. Vivian Stringer was a classmate of Dr. Scott's at Slippery Rock, and he once played a game of two-on-two with her--losing badly. She formed the first black action society on campus, serving as president while Dr. Scott was treasurer.) This is the person you keep seeing on TV, who is agreeing to do this media because of the power of her message: about being hard-working, about these young women being somebody's daughters, and somebody's mama somewhere having heard what Imus said. She's revealing the human texture of what he said. These are scholar-athletes! Here she is calling for a return to moral decency.
Now, Vivian is a Christian woman. What Imus never bothered to find out was that Vivian, when she was at Slippery Rock, was the sweetheart of a fellow named Bill Stringer, whom she later married. He was a young African American who came to Slippery Rock and decided to be a gymnast. Guess how many black gymnasts we'd had there before then? Zero. He was the only one who had so far even thought, "Hey, I'd like to try that." For every single year when he was involved and for five years after he graduated held the record for the trampoline (an event they don't have in gymnastics any more). He was something! But he was all Vivian's, and guess who was more sought after once they'd graduated ... she was.
Now, before she got to Rutgers, Bill Stringer had a massive heart attack and died. When this woman's on TV, talking about the struggle of life, she isn't telling you half of what she's been through. Last night on TV, she was talking about her father having been a coal miner who lost both of his legs and was not content until he had educated all of his children. But Imus doesn't know anything about Vivian. He doesn't know that she married her college sweetheart and that they had children, and that some of these children weren't born entirely healthy, and that she's had to struggle along the way pursuing excellence in athletics for young women, that she's had to do it while she's lamented the passing of her husband. And he's going to say about this woman and her remarkable atheletes, "Those are some nappy-headed hos"? How dare he!
Here's the thing: It's true that we are forgiven of our sins. But they are indeed sins for which we need to be forgiven. All of us have fallen short of the glory of God. We can extend forgiveness to Imus. But here's the problem for him: He made his living by pushing the envelope. The more he did it, the more people listened because their ears are tickled by such things. The more people listened, the more advertisers bought time for commercials. It was like encouragement to him: "Go ahead!" He continued to do it for the sake of making the money. But when he pushed it where he pushed it, there was an outcry. And people asked Vivian, "What do you think should happen to him?" She said, "That's not my call." And when people talked about how rap artists use this kind of language, she says, "This man is three times older than rap artists!" In other words, he's supposed to know better.
But the reason this kind of thing continues to fill our neighborhoods is that someone's making money. The attempts to alter what the record companies will allow have failed only because it's lucrative, not because we don't object to what is recorded on these labels. We have been objecting to it all along. Some want to assert that there's a double-standard in the black community about this, but there isn't. We don't want this kind of language in front of our children! But there are some record companies making a ton of money, and the artists have been encouraged to do it for their profit.
So Imus lost his job, not because anyone failed to forgive him, but because the people who were paying him said so. They were afraid if they didn't, people would boycott their products. He had his job because of money, and he lost his job because of money. Our God has nothing to do with that, only the god he served does: money.
It's altogether possible that this man isn't a racist, that his motivation in saying what he said was strictly because he thought he was being cute, and it's so much a part of the prevailing, pervasive culture that he thought it would be accepted and even thought funny. Yet while people have the right to say what they will say, they do not have the right to harm. This was injurious. And can people harm others unintentionally? Yes, it happens all the time.
This is one reason religion is important: It marks boundaries, gives us guidelines for knowing how our voices may be used in such a way that God may favor. God is not a god of license, even if He is a god of liberty. License and liberty aren't the same things. Liberty requires responsibility, law, and boundary. License is the observation of no law, no boundaries, and no limits. Doing whatever you want to do is its own form of bondage; doing whatever you can in respect of the law is liberty.
Dr. Scott related how he recently took a group of students to Monticello to tour Thomas Jefferson's plantation home and grounds. He talked about how until only a few years ago, there was no mention of the slaves, their lives, nor particularly the life and relationships of Sally Hemings and her family. (That was corrected in large part through the study and work of Dianne Swann-Wright, Ph.D., who later became the curator of the AME museum at Mother Bethel in Philadelphia.)
Today, the curators and interpreters at Monticello do reveal a good bit more about the people who were held in bondage there, and they do tell the story of how Jefferson's great debt at his death was relieved through the sale of many slaves at auction. There were some who were freed, and who walked off the plantation never to be heard from again--possibly descendents of Jefferson, children he'd had with Sally Hemings. Yet even though Jefferson abhored slavery, he saw it a "necessary evil," something that those who came after him would have to solve.
Do you see how money so often trumps decency? Except among the few, incorruptible faithful. The big lesson from the few verses we got through tonight have to do with the authentic practice of religion versus the pursuit of mammon.
Join us in two weeks! Bible Study will be held again on Thursday night, 5/3, at 6:30 p.m.
Just ran across this related quotation from Abraham Lincoln, who finally made good on what Jefferson did not:
"Moral principle is a looser bond than pecuniary interest." (from a speech in October 1856)
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